EDITORIAL – Holocaust files ought to be public

While an Austrian court has just sentenced a man to three years in prison for denying the… While an Austrian court has just sentenced a man to three years in prison for denying the Holocaust – which some say violates his right to freedom of speech – America and Germany are engaged in a battle over publicizing details of the atrocities committed in Nazi concentration camps.

The United States wants closed archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany, to be opened to the public, while the German government is resisting the move, according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times.

The situation seems strange, given Germany’s usual cooperation on matters regarding the history of the Holocaust.

What’s at stake here is a delicate balance between the privacy of the victims and the public’s right to know exactly what happened.

The archives contain data on approximately 17.5 million individuals, including such information as which prisoners were treated for lice, camp medical experiments and Nazi accusations of homosexuality, murder and pedophilia, The Times reported.

Allied troops collected the files during liberation of concentration camps. The International Committee of the Red Cross – made up of representatives from 11 countries, including the United States and Germany – oversees the archives via its Tracing Service.

Opening the archives would include the creation of copies for each of the 11 countries that make up the committee.

As of now, only victims, their relatives and their lawyers have access to the information, and getting it is a slow, slow process.

According to The Times, the Tracing Service – which was started toward the end of World War II to help people find out what happened to their relatives – can take years to respond to an inquiry.

Partly as a result of staffing cuts, the service is backlogged by more than 400,000 inquiries.

Opponents of opening the archives argue that it would create “legal difficulties” and violate victims’ privacy.

By making the information public, the German government would allow historians access to far more details about what happened in Nazi concentration camps – details that ought to be recorded in accounts of human history.

But no one’s demanding that this data be made public for the sake of profit, exploitation or abuse. Even if there were a way to misuse this particular information, one would have to be really sick to do so. And such misuse would still be punishable.

It’s keeping the information secret that would be an abuse.

Paul Shapiro, of the United States Holocaust Museum, told The Times that, “Hiding this record is a form of Holocaust denial.”

And he’s right: Hiding the details is hiding part of the truth.

One common message in studying the Holocaust is how important it is that the world never forgets. Making the details available is a significant part of acknowledging and remembering what happened.

Besides all that, the copies should exist if only for the sake of having a backup. Things happen; buildings are burned, bombed and flooded; electronic files become corrupted. If the facility at Bad Arolsen were to be destroyed, wouldn’t it be good to know that the records still exist in 10 other countries?